US people get through 34GB a day

Emma Woollacott, 10th December 2009

A study by the University of California, San Diego UCSD said that counting all information sources, an American consumes 34GB of data a day.

However, the information fed to US people is largely based on TV, computer games and movies. The researchers say that everything else adds up to less than one percent.

34 gigabytes a day amounts to around seven DVD disks, or a fifth of a notebook computer's hard drive.

The report draws its conclusions from a wide variety of media, including print publications. US households in 2008 only spent five percent of the "information time" reading newspapers, magazines and books.

Ten years back, only 40 percent of US homes had a PC only a quarter of those had net access, but current estimates are that 70 percent of Americans own a PC with Internet access.